Those bloodstained ’70s and ’80s horror remakes just keep popping up: “Halloween,” “The Last House on the Left,” “Friday the 13th.” Now Hollywood can add “A Nightmare on Elm Street” to that underwhelming assemblage. And it fares no better than its recent predecessors.

Ed Symkus

Those bloodstained ’70s and ’80s horror remakes just keep popping up: “Halloween,” “The Last House on the Left,” “Friday the 13th.” Now Hollywood can add “A Nightmare on Elm Street” to that underwhelming assemblage. And it fares no better than its recent predecessors.

You know the drill. Gather a bunch of good-looking high school-age actors, then bump ’em off one at a time. And make sure each killing grows just a tad more gruesome.

This one has the audacity to actually start on a dark and stormy night. To be fair, the first killing, done up in greasy diner style, involves a steak knife and a bared throat – and it’s a doozy, bringing to mind the nasty opening sequence in David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises.”

From then on, with the exception of a couple of startlingly creepy scenes, the story of dead Fred Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) coming back to haunt kids while they’re awake and slice them up while they’re asleep is a snooze.

Just in case viewers aren’t paying enough attention (or are nodding off), the script has characters calling each other by name ad nauseam. This isn’t exactly a scientific count, but I believe “Nancy” is said 61 times, and “Quentin” is uttered 68 times. At one point the camera also manages to linger on Nancy’s name tag at the diner.

The deal here is that these kids are having trouble entering any kind of dream state. It’s not that they can’t sleep; it’s that they mustn’t, or the guy with the striped sweater will – to borrow from Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days” – cut them into little pieces.

The young, mostly unknown, actors (“Twilight” fans will recognize Kellan Lutz) give it their all, but music video director Samuel Bayer is in over his head, trying to stay loyal to the original without ripping it off.

Wes Craven’s 1984 film, while not exactly a classic, did break ground in the genre by mixing garish horror with dark humor. This one has a few effective comic moments, but it’s mostly a case of more gore.

The big differences between the two films are that the still awake kids here learn all about sleep deprivation on an Internet search engine, one of them manages to stay awake by chasing down pep pills with some Red Bull, and there’s a totally unnecessary plethora of F-bombs.

The idea of having former child actor Jackie Earle Haley (who was terrific in last year’s “Watchmen”) play Krueger was a good one, but the poor guy has been stuck with a hack makeup job that makes his supposedly burned face look like papier-mâché, and his voice has been digitally lowered to sound like a cheap imitation of Christian Bale’s growling Batman.

So is this the start of a new franchise? I doubt it. Freddy’s blades are sharp, but the movie is dull. It was done on the cheap, so it should make its money back. But then it’ll fade away like a bad dream.